Chapter 12

Being Christian, Thinking Greek

In This Chapter

Linking everything in the Great Chain of Being

Hammering out beliefs in the early Christian Church

Adapting Platonic thinking

Paving the way to salvation

At a casual glance, Christianity and the philosophies that pre-Christian Greeks developed don’t seem to have much to do with each other. Jesus, after all, was a Jew. His followers saw him as the messiah promised by the Hebrew Scriptures. They consider him both the Son of God and that God in human form — a monotheistic God.

In contrast, the Greek philosophers came from a polytheistic tradition. (To find out about polytheistic religions, see Chapter 10. For more on the Greek philosophers, see Chapter 11.) They were unconnected to the Christian message, yet the Greek philosophies didn’t go away after Christianity became the dominant faith of the Roman Empire and then post-Roman Europe. If anything, those old philosophies became more important than ever.

Greek thought — especially the lines of thought founded by Plato and Aristotle — worked right to the center of Christian religious contemplations and the way European society was organized. Theologians adapted Aristotelian and Platonic ideas into Church teachings through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. In fact, a Christian interpretation of Aristotle’s philosophy shaped the attitudes that brought about the Renaissance.

 All the Christian theology and philosophy mentioned in this chapter flowed from Greek ways of thinking. And at every stage through these Christian times, philosophical movements reached back to the Greeks and Romans for their ideological underpinnings.

The Great Chain of Being

One Greek idea that hung around into Christian times came to be known as the Great Chain of Being. This way of ordering reality owes its foundation to the tradition of Platonic thought (see Chapter 11). The Great Chain of Being was central to the way most Christians looked at the world in medieval and Renaissance times.

The Great Chain is an organizational chart of existence with the richest, most complex grade of existence at the top and the humblest at the bottom. Everything can be ranked by its relative distance from the ultimate, or ideal, reality. This Platonic notion adapted well to Christianity, which put God at the top of the chain. Everybody and everything had a station on the chain — each above and below certain other links in the chain.

 The Great Chain lent itself to the certainty that kings were closer to God than lesser nobles, who were closer to God than commoners were. Serfs, who were essentially slaves, could be comfortably tucked at the bottom of Christian humanity without worry. Yet even serfs got to be above animals and other life forms. Worms and fleas and such were waaay down there. Thus, differences between levels of human society and between biological species were the same thing — part of the proper, godly order.

The Great Chain of Being was rigidly conservative. It nailed society’s institutions — especially class distinctions — in place and went hand in hand with the notion of the divine right of kings, under which doctrine a monarch’s authority came from God and a kingdom’s obedience to its sovereign reflected Christendom’s obedience to the Almighty. To defy the state was to defy God on high.

Kings and would-be kings disagreed all the time, of course, about who was God’s rightful candidate. Sometimes churchmen — a term meaning not just priests, bishops, cardinals, and popes but also learned monks — got into these arguments, too. (You can find several of their clashes addressed in Chapters 7 and 13.) But the overarching principle of the Great Chain hung on through the Middle Ages and beyond.

Interpreting Christian Theology

Based on Jesus’s teachings about God’s forgiveness and on the miracle of the Resurrection of Christ (see Chapter 10), Christianity gave rise to more than 2,000 years’ worth of painstaking theological interpretation and fierce, often violent, disagreements that often have grown into wars.

Divergent ideas aren’t unusual in religion. Most beliefs evolve with variations on their central themes emerging and breaking off from the central religion. In the case of Christianity, circumstances contributed to early and wide-ranging interpretations.

Stacking scripture upon scripture

One reason Christianity was so open to various interpretations is that it’s a religion built on another religion, embracing the writings of the original — Jewish — tradition as its own.

The Holy Scripture consists of the much-older Jewish Bible (the Old Testament) with the newer, Christian writings from the first century AD (the New Testament). From the get-go, Christians had to make decisions about how to reconcile this wealth of literature. What did these incredibly rich writings — often seemingly contradictory from one book to another and from Old to New Testaments — really mean?

By necessity, Church fathers based their teachings on interpretations — not always agreed upon among themselves — of God’s will. For example, although Christians revere the Hebrew Scriptures, they never followed many Hebrew laws. Judaism’s dietary restrictions and ritual circumcision weren’t part of the new religion. Saint Paul, a Jewish rabbi before his conversion, brought the gospel message to many gentiles (non-Jews) in the first century AD. He taught that Christians who were not by birth Jews could disregard these Hebrew requirements.

Replacing Homer with the Bible

Furious interpretations and counter-interpretations marked Christianity from the beginning in part because of the places where Christianity sprang up. Christianity filtered through a world marked by Hellenistic (Greek-like) traditions, by the Greek teachings that followed Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Alexander the Great’s empire.

 Early centers of the Church included Alexandria, Egypt, which was a capital of Greek scholarship, and Rome, where so many Hellenistic philosophies rubbed up against one another for a long time. The New Testament was written in Greek, and Jesus came to be known by a Greek word meaning “messiah”: Christ.

As Greek thought shifted to Christian thought, the Bible took the place of Homer’s poems and the Greek-Roman pantheon as a general context for philosophical questioning. By the Greek-Roman pantheon, I mean the many gods, such as Zeus (the father god), Athena (goddess of wisdom), Apollo (god of the sun), and Dionysus (god of wine and celebration). Greeks worshipped these human-like, yet supernatural personalities and credited them with influencing nature and human lives. The Greek gods were characters in Homer’s poems and in many other stories (today calledmyths) that all Greeks knew. Romans, who worshipped many of the same gods by different names, knew the stories, too. When pre-Christian Greeks and Romans talked about abstract concepts such asgood, they relied on phrases such as “pleasing to the gods.” They used stories about the gods to illustrate points of philosophy.

The intellectual energy from all the Greek-based philosophies of the Hellenistic Age seemed to funnel into Christian philosophy. Philosophical thought became the province of theologians — people trying to figure out, or at least interpret, God. In the part of the world that embraced Christianity, scholarly priests absorbed and redefined the ideas of the Greeks, channeling those ideas into beliefs about how the Church and the world should be arranged.

Establishing Jesus’s Divinity

 Constantine the Great and his co-emperor Licinius issued the Edict of Milan, which ordered toleration of Christians, in 313 AD. Only 12 years later, after Constantine had defeated and killed Licinius to become sole Roman emperor, he called together the top bishops of the newly liberated Christian Church. The churchmen met at Nicaea, a town near Constantine’s new Christian capital of Constantinople, to hammer out important issues. (Chapter 6 covers Constantine’s founding of Constantinople.)

At the meeting in Nicaea, the bishops wanted to work out an official policy about Jesus’s divinity: Just how divine was he? In the early centuries of the Church, some priests taught that Jesus, as the Son of God, was subordinate to his father, the Hebrew God. Others thought that Jesus was essentially a mortal and God’s greatest prophet, but not divine. The bishops disagreed with these ideas and drew up the Nicene Creed, which said that Jesus was God the Son — in essence, the same as God the Father.

The issue of Jesus’s divinity wasn’t settled easily, however. (It remains a point of departure for some sects even today.) Disagreement over whether Jesus and God the Father were the same or similar separated Christians in Rome from those in Constantinople. And the question of how to regard the third part of the Christian Trinity — the Holy Spirit — was a sore spot between the Western and Eastern branches of the Church and a major cause of their eventual split from one another. (You can find more about the split in Chapter 10.)

Augustine’s Influence on Early Christian Thought

The most influential early interpretations of Christian thought come from Saint Augustine, a North African who followed Platonic philosophy and a religion called Manicheism before he was baptized as a Christian in 387 AD. Augustine then became a priest and was appointed the Bishop of Hippo (not the pudgy, water-loving animal, but a city in what is today Algeria).

Divining the mind of God

Some of Augustine’s early writings adapted Plato’s ideas to Christianity. According to Plato (turn to Chapter 11 for more on him), everything you can see and experience is an imperfect reflection of a perfect, eternal Form or Idea. In other words, there is an Idea of a table and an Idea of a woman that are apart from and superior to all actual tables and all actual women. In Augustine’s version of Plato’s philosophy, these eternal Ideas reside inside a mind — the mind of God.

Condoning righteous killing

Augustine’s teachings affected history powerfully and directly. One example: Although some early Christians were strict pacifists and interpreted the biblical command “Thou shalt not kill” quite literally, Augustine wrote that war isn’t wrong if it’s conducted on divine authority. He also taught that it’s okay to carry out the death penalty in accordance with the laws of the state.

 According to Augustine, a just, Christian society has the authority to kill people. This opens the moral and ethical door wide, considering that there aren’t many societies whose leaders would admit to being unjust.

Tracing two paths to salvation

What does the title of a television sitcom have to do with Christian philosophy? The title of Will and Grace (aired 1998–2006) may have been a joke on the creators’ liberal arts education, but even that reflects how deeply philosophical arguments run into the workings of the world.

Will (as in free will) and grace (as in God’s grace alone) are two possible paths to salvation in competing Christian philosophies. They reflect a debate that began in the writings of Saint Augustine.

Adapting Augustine’s ideas

Unlike just about anybody on television these days, Augustine rejected sexual pleasure and things of the flesh. He seems to have picked up this aversion during a youthful fling with Manicheism, which was founded in Persia (today’s Iran) in the third century AD.

Manicheism taught that the material world represents the powers of darkness, which have invaded the realm of light. An ascetic and puritanical religion, Manicheism seems to have marked Augustine profoundly even though he roundly denounced it when he converted to Christianity. Especially as he got older, he became firmly convinced that the whole human race had somehow taken part in the sin of Adam and Eve — an idea called original sin.

In the Bible story of man’s creation, Adam is enticed by Eve to disobey God’s order not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. God drives Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden for this. Here’s where Augustine started interpreting: He believed that everybody descended from Adam inherited that original sin of disobedience. That’s everybody — except God in human form, meaning the immaculately conceived Jesus. And so the only thing that can save any human soul is God’s grace. Further, God awards that grace (and this is the tricky part) without regard for individual merit. That is, you can’t earn your way into heaven. Prayer and good deeds won’t do it. Salvation or damnation is decided beforehand in what’s called predestination, and you have no free will. You can’t even hope to understand grace. God is beyond understanding.

As you may imagine, Augustine’s theory of predestination proved controversial. (And yes, that’s a monumental understatement.) Many who rejected his doctrine preferred the view that God gave human beings free will — a mind and the ability to make up that mind — and that with that freedom comes the responsibility to embrace God.

Predestination has been interpreted and argued about in endless ways since Augustine. Some versions embrace fatalism, the idea that the future is just as unchangeable as the past. Not all versions of predestination go that far, nor are all versions restricted to Christian thought. For example, in Islam, a person can’t oppose God’s will but can accept or reject God. If you reject God, you face dire consequences. Much of Christianity took philosophical routes not far from this one.

Promoting other views on predestination

Some leaders of the Protestant Reformation embraced predestination (find more on this movement in Chapter 14). The Frenchman John Calvin, a major force in shaping Protestantism, was especially Augustinian. His version of predestination, called theological determinism, asserts that people can’t influence God in the matter of who is saved and who isn’t.

In most branches of Christianity that preach a form of predestination, believers are supposed to be good — that is, to do God’s will — out of faith, love, and devotion. But they’re not supposed to behave virtuously just because they’re angling for a heavenly payoff or out of fear of eternal punishment. Yet without the spiritual equivalent of a carrot or stick, keeping some people on the narrow path is impossible, so some moralists consider predestination a lousy motivator.

The Philosophy of Aquinas

From the way Augustine looked at religion (see the preceding section), you couldn’t understand anything without first believing in God. The last thing you’d want to do would be to try to arrive at belief by way of understanding. Belief, in this medieval tradition of scholarship, was the foundation of understanding.

It was later in the Middle Ages that some Christian scholars — inspired by their reading of Plato’s student, Aristotle — began to reason that if God is reflected in material reality, then the study of the world can lead to an understanding of God. Chief among these was the Italian priest and author Thomas Aquinas, whose ideas would help spark the Renaissance.

Keeping scholarship alive

The idea of medieval times as dark ages where everybody in Europe was sunk in ignorance fails to account for the fact that universities are a medieval invention. The University of Bologna, in Italy, was the first university, founded in the tenth century. Then there was the University of Paris in the twelfth century and Oxford in the thirteenth.

 Scholasticism was the intellectual tradition at these universities. Saint Anselm, an archbishop of Canterbury (in England) at the turn of the twelfth century and a scholastic himself, described scholasticism as “faith seeking understanding.” With that orientation, working out ideas using Greek philosophy was considered okay.

For early churchmen, Aristotle’s line of reasoning caused more trouble than Plato’s.

In Augustine’s faith-based brand of Christian Platonism, you don’t have to see and touch and feel objects (things your senses perceive) in order to find out about the truth. Those things, by definition, aren’t true. They may be reflections of the truth, but the truth is in the Idea, which flows from God.

In Aristotle’s way of looking at the world, you can work your way up to understanding, even to understanding ultimate truth, using your senses and reason. This approach puts much more responsibility on the sinful human being.

Scholasticism embraced the Aristotelian way of doing things after Thomas Aquinas (later Saint Thomas Aquinas) brought Aristotle into the Church in the thirteenth century.

Coming back to Aristotle

Aquinas wasn’t the first medieval European scholar to be drawn to Aristotle. An important predecessor — not a Christian, but a Muslim — was Ibn Rushd, who became known to Latin-speaking European scholars as Averroës. He was an Islamic judge and physician of the twelfth century who lived and worked both in Moorish Spain and in North Africa.

Averroës’s writings contemplating Aristotle found their way to a German with the unwieldy name Albertus, Graf von Bollstädt. (Graf von means “count of.”) Also a churchman, he taught at the University of Paris, where he started applying Averroës’s arguments to Christian faith and established the study of nature as a legitimate scholarly pursuit. Albertus (better known today as St. Albertus Magnus or St. Albert the Great) passed on his interest in Aristotle to his pupil, Thomas Aquinas.

Supporting faith with logic

Aquinas wrote the major works that hooked Aristotelian reasoning into the Church, where it eventually became official Catholic doctrine. Aquinas even used Aristotle’s logic to prove the existence of God.

 How did he do that? Here’s an example of his logic:

[W]hat is in motion must be put in motion by another. If that by which it is put in motion be itself put in motion, then this also must needs be put in motion by another, and that by another again. But this cannot go on to infinity, because then there would be no first mover, and consequently, no other mover. . . . Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God.

Arguments such as that one fired scholastics with a passion for using their minds to get at the root of big questions. The Christian universities became places where scholars pursued logic and rhetoric and debated the nature of being (within boundaries).

Embracing Humanism and More

Embracing the human intellect as a tool to confirm faith contributed to big movements in world history, such as the Renaissance (which you can read about in Chapter 13). The focus on intellect also led to a rediscovery of Classical (that is, Greek and Roman) science, which led Europeans to scientific and navigational advances. And that, in turn, helped make possible the voyages of world exploration that I talk about in Chapter 8. The reliance on rational thought wasn’t a linear path, however. Not at all. You can point to scholasticism as a root of something called humanism, which focuses on the relationship between God and humans. Yet humanistic thinking arose as a backlash against the scholastics; it was a reaction to the abstract concerns of medieval scholarship — all that logic and analysis and such.

Nothing secular about it

 Nowadays, humanism usually comes after the word secular. Secular humanism is often criticized as an anti-religious philosophy, but late medieval and Renaissance humanism was a Christian religious movement. Humanists asked, “What is humankind’s place in God’s plan?”

That doesn’t mean that the humanists broke with all those centuries of reaching back to Greek philosophy. Early humanism is identified with Neoplatonism (which I tell you about in Chapter 11). Humanism didn’t embrace Augustine’s brand of Platonism, however. Augustine mistrusted the things of the world, which he saw as false reflections of the perfect reality (God). Living in this false, material world, human beings couldn’t understand God.

Humanistic Neoplatonism looked at things the other way around, seeing human beings as not just made by God but also as expressions of godliness. Giovanni, Conte Pico della Mirandola (from Mirandola, Italy) was a Renaissance philosopher who probably expressed it best. In his view, all the universe — stars, trees, dogs, sausages, and human beings, especially human beings — reflected God. (Read more about Pico della Mirandola in Chapter 13.) Humans could be understood as perfect expressions of the ultimate truth and as a small version of God’s universe — a microcosm.

A human being could not only seek God but also could find God within the individual soul. You could look inside your finite self and find infinity.

Tracing humanism’s impact

Humanism’s concept that people have the ability to find God had everything to do with what happened in Renaissance art, theology, philosophy, science, and even politics. If everything that human beings can think and create, including pre-Christian art and science, reflects God, the door to exploration opens all the way. As I explain in Chapter 13, the Renaissance brought major scientific discoveries, giving rise to the Enlightenment, a rational-humanist philosophical movement that, in turn, brought forth modern democratic theory.

Tracking the Centuries

325 AD: Christian bishops gather near Constantinople (in today’s Turkey) to hammer out basic theological principles.

354 AD: Aurelius Augustinius, later known as Saint Augustine, is born in the Roman-ruled community of Numidia, North Africa.

387 AD: Augustine becomes a Christian, accepting baptism on Easter Sunday.

1180s: Ibn Rushd, an Islamic judge and physician in Moorish Spain, writes interpretations of the Greek philosopher Aristotle.

1273: In his book Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas shows Aristotle’s thoughts to be compatible with Christian doctrine.

1879: The Roman Catholic Church adopts the writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas as official Catholic philosophy.